Former Mobile County treasurer Vivian Beckerle announced in March 2006 that she would seek the Democratic nomination for Congress from Alabama’s First District, taking on a seat that had been in Republican hands for more than four decades.
The seat was held by U.S. Rep. Jo Bonner, R-Mobile, who was seeking his third two-year term that year.
A Party Switch and a Long-Shot Bid
Beckerle’s candidacy carried an unusual biography. She had been a Republican herself for most of her 12 years as county treasurer. About midway through her final term, she switched to the Democratic Party. She then ran for general administrator of Mobile County as a Democrat and lost. Her husband and law partner, Bob Beckerle, was chairman of the Mobile County Democratic Party.
She did not pretend the race would be easy.
“This is a big undertaking,” Beckerle said of her congressional bid. “I think we need to do this. All my adult voting years that chair has been sat upon by a Republican. There have been several Democratic challengers along the way. We’ve just never been able to secure the seat. We do not need to concede it. We need to work for it.”
The history bore her out. The First District had been Republican since 1964, when retired Congressman Jack Edwards won the seat on a GOP ticket headed by unsuccessful presidential nominee Barry Goldwater, part of the realignment that turned the Deep South from a Democratic stronghold into Republican territory.
The Issues She Named
Among the matters Beckerle said she hoped to see addressed in the campaign were the liquefied natural gas plant then under consideration for the Mobile County area and the erosion of benefits for veterans of the U.S. military.
The LNG question was live and contentious in South Alabama at the time. Proposals to site facilities for receiving and regasifying imported liquefied natural gas drew arguments about energy supply and industrial jobs on one side and about safety, siting and coastal environmental risk on the other. It was the kind of issue that cut across ordinary party lines in a district with both a working industrial waterfront and a tourism economy dependent on the health of the coast.
The District Itself
Alabama’s First Congressional District was home to roughly 635,300 people spread across six counties: Baldwin, Clarke, Escambia, Mobile, Monroe and Washington. Clarke was the only split county in the district, with part of it served at the time by Rep. Artur Davis, D-Birmingham.
Its economic base was as varied as its geography. Row crops and pine forests filled the northern counties. The Alabama Gulf Coast anchored the south. Between them, aerospace, healthcare, chemical plants, timber mills, shipping companies and the seafood industry made up the district’s primary employers, alongside agriculture and tourism.
That mix explains why the First District has never been a simple place to campaign. A candidate must speak to shrimpers in Bayou La Batre, timber owners in Washington County, chemical workers up the Mobile River, retirees on the Eastern Shore and beach-town business owners in Baldwin County, often in the same week.
The Long Odds
Beckerle’s argument was less about the arithmetic of the race than about the principle of contesting it. A seat left uncontested, in her telling, was a seat conceded, and a party that stops fielding candidates stops being a party. Whatever the outcome, the district’s Democrats would at least have a name on the ballot and a set of issues on the table.
The First District remained in Republican hands through that election and in the years since, but the questions Beckerle raised in the spring of 2006, about energy infrastructure on the coast and about the obligations owed to veterans, proved durable. Both would keep returning to South Alabama ballots long after that particular campaign had ended.